Review: Odetta - At Carnegie Hall (1960)

Tracks: 1) If I Had A Hammer; 2) I’m Going Back To The Red Clay Country; 3) When I Was A Young Girl; 4) Gallows Pole; 5) God’s A-Gonna Cut You Down; 6) John Riley; 7) John Henry; 8) Joshua Fought The Battle Of Jericho; 9) All The Pretty Little Horses; 10) Prettiest Train; 11) Meeting At The Building; 12) No More Auction Block For Me; 13) Hold On; 14) Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child; 15) Ain’t No Grave Can Hold My Body Down.

REVIEW

The value of this album is first and foremost symbolic: to have an album recorded At Carnegie Hall means an honorable place in the spotlight, in this case signifying progression from the small cafes of Greenwich Village, limited to bohemians and intellectuals, onto a national level of recognition. Although Odetta was far from the first neo-folk artist to have performed and be recorded at the venue (The Weavers had their first live album recorded there as early as 1957), it was still an important achievement both for herself and the entire movement — seriously increasing the role of the folk singer (if not quite yet the «singer-songwriter») in contemporary music culture and all that. How do you get to Carnegie Hall, anyway? Buy yourself a guitar and rent a room in Chelsea around 1960...

Impressively, for this performance, recorded on April 8, 1960, Odetta comes up with an almost completely new setlist; only two of the songs (‘Gallows Pole’ and ‘All The Pretty Little Horses’) are reprised from the Gates Of Horn LP, and one more (‘God’s A-Gonna Cut You Down’) from her debut album — the rest of the selections had not yet been tried out in the studio. This is a good thing, because even if comparison of the live and studio versions shows that the live playing and singing are more intense (particularly on ‘Gallows Pole’), it feels as if the intensity is largely due to technical reasons — the venue’s monumental environment has Odetta trying harder than usual so as to properly reach the audience, rather than «let her hair down» like a rock’n’roll performer would typically behave. On the whole, though, Odetta live is (unsurprisingly) not too different from Odetta in the studio. There is no stage banter, there is virtually no improvisation, and there seem to be no spontaneous or spurious changes to the songs — which is perfectly understandable, since at this point in time all of those «oldies» must have sounded quite fresh and new to the ears of most of the people in the concert hall, and Odetta’s point was to get their message across, not to mess around with them.

Joining her for most of the concert is the ever-loyal Bill Lee on bass, and for the last four numbers, a gospel choir from the local Church of the Master. As usual, the songs are a mix of three categories — straightforward gospel numbers; African-American work songs and slave ballads; and a bunch of old English folk ballads carried over from the other side of the Atlantic. As usual, I remain a bit torn about the last category: for all the joys of genre-mixing and a «color-independent» approach to performing, Odetta sounds more at ease singing ‘Motherless Child’ and ‘No More Auction Block’ than narrating the woes and troubles of pre-industrial era British fair maidens — the same way Joan Baez sounds significantly more at ease narrating the woes and troubles of pre-industrial era British fair maidens than trying to sound like a cotton field worker. This is not to imply that Odetta’s performance of ‘John Riley’ is worthless, but her big, bulky voice is not a natural choice for this kind of material, which requires more finesse and fragility.

Then again, this is precisely why LPs are more than just collections of individual songs: extracting ‘John Riley’ or ‘When I Was A Young Girl’ from this record, to treat them as autonomous nuggets within some randomized playlist, is destructive. The album works best as an album, whose symbolic significance is in the unity of the folk tradition — showing that British folk, white American folk, and black American folk ultimately share the same roots (well, at least some of the same roots), and that folk music need not be perceived as boring or monotonous if you do not painstakingly sub-divide it into a whole lot of separate traditions and styles.

Thus, the record kicks off with a powerful one-two punch as Odetta jackhammers her way through the ubiquitous ‘If I Had A Hammer’ (at least hers feels like it’s made out of solid metal, rather than the quaint rose-glass tool of Peter, Paul & Mary) and the non-stop vocal-slaughter of ‘I’m Going Back To The Red Clay Country’, where the main trick is to stretch out every single vowel until the whole song turns into a barely decipherable, but awesomely irresistible, «mooing and bellowing» vocalize. Then, whoops, the singer is suddenly all gentrified and her voice takes the elevator to higher ranges on ‘When I Was A Young Girl’, warning Carnegie Hall concert goers about the dangers of excessive ale consumption — don’t do it, kids, or you’ll ruin your falsetto range forever. And soon afterwards, the troubled young maiden reverts to Biblical matron, blasting out a powerful a cappella sermon with ‘God’s A-Gonna Cut You Down’, a great showcase for Odetta’s sense of phrasing, breath control, and loudness dynamics (again, higher, louder, and much more intense than the studio version: you can even hear the audience spontaneously explode in a brief ovation when Odetta jumps out of her «quiet mumble mode» on the last verse to go all ballistic on the final chorus).

This sequencing, even if some of the performances individually work much better than others, ensures that the program never gets bogged down in too much «sameyness» — the worst and most common thing that can happen to a guy or a gal with just their acoustic guitar out there — and this good level of variation and excitement is retained through most of the album’s running time. It may look a little amusing to see two songs named ‘John Riley’ and ‘John Henry’ sitting right next to each other on the setlist, but they are naturally two very different Johns — one imported over from Elizabethan England, the other left over from 19th century America — and they naturally get completely different treatments. Like I already said, I’m not overtly pleased with the former, but ‘John Henry’ gets a more monumental vocal tribute from Odetta than any previous recording known to man. She really drops the hammer on this one, just the way, one might think, it should have been dropped in the first place: an anthem to a legendary American SuperMan™, adequately vocalized by the contemporary American SuperWoman™.

The last four numbers, for which Odetta engages the assistance of the choir, aim at adding a bit of a mystical vibe to the proceedings. The choir never explodes into jubilation; for most of the time, it stays in the low-key, «mumbling» range, as if weaving a dark, ominous cloud, lapping at the heels of the singer — or perhaps, more accurately, having the singer run right into it, groping her way through the spiritual fog with determination. It’s a very tasteful and genuinely moving use of the choir’s power, simultaneously recreating a really «ol’ time», pre-Emancipation Proclamation feeling, and aimed at letting the audience leave with a clear understanding that the fight is not over yet. If you can stand the slightly antiquated pathos of it all — her ‘Motherless Child’ feels as if it is channelling the attitude of Marian Anderson’s and Paul Robeson’s recordings from the 1930s — you might even experience a little catharsis on the way.

Fortunately for the listeners, Odetta does not end the show with the utmost bleakness of ‘Motherless Child’, but rather on a more uplifting note with ‘Ain’t No Grave Can Hold My Body Down’ — the closest the record does come to a note of gospel jubilation. Ironically, it also feels like her weakest performance here to me, because it shows the limitations of her upper register — the song absolutely does not require the singer to slip into falsetto unless of her own extra volition, but for some reason, she decides that a contrast between high and low might do good to the overall emotional effect, and, instead of ending the song with power, puts it on its back with a breaking cat-in-heat meaow, like a gymnastics champion messing up the final landing after an immaculately performed series of jumps. Oops!

Minor quibbles like this aside, At Carnegie Hall is ample proof that Odetta had both the brawn and the brain to win over the audience. No video footage exists of the event, of course, and it would be futile to expect an Odetta show to be captured on American camera in the late 1950s or early 1960s; the closest thing to seeing the lady in her prime is a half-hour recording made for Belgian TV in 1964, with a completely different setlist from Carnegie Hall but a similar approach to setlist construction — and a good opportunity to put a face to the music (almost literally so, since the cameraman focuses almost entirely on Odetta’s face throughout the show; and a beautifully emotional face it is, although I sure wish she would open her eyes more than once or twice... still not figuring out if it’s all a matter of being «carried away» to the world of cotton fields and sweet potatoes, or just a consequence of natural shyness; quite possibly the latter, since Odetta was often reported as being prone to extreme fits of stage fright).

Of course, you don’t necessarily have to put a face to the music in order to understand that she was the real deal; the voice pretty much speaks for itself, and it’s a voice that imbues a liberation song like ‘No More Auction Block For Me’ with much more sense and «naturalness» (if not necessarily more depth) than, say, Bob Dylan covering it in his early folk days. If only the power, conviction, variety, and professionalism of this approach could be complemented with a proper sense of humor and a faint hint at original songwriting, indicating progression from traditionalism into the future... well, yes, then we’d have Bob Dylan. But there is no way that the existence of Bob Dylan in this world could completely cancel out the roles of the Odettas and the Joan Baezes, either.

• Only Solitaire reviews: Odetta